Good post. I have always been of the same opinion: high-def DVDs are doomed to the same fate as the high-end audio formats. I assure you that HDCD and DVD-Audio

Good post. I have always been of the same opinion: high-def DVDs are doomed to the same fate as the high-end audio formats. I assure you that HDCD and DVD-Audio discs sound really great on a high-end stereo system, but they don't sound great enough for the mass market to actually give a damn. I can’t even guess what mass movie downloading would do to the internet’s overall structure, but I’m sure it will adapt. It is just not that big a problem. There are only so many movies in the world -- the good ones take time and money to make -- and 1TB hard drives are now cheap. Let's see... Netflix claims to have 90k titles. An HD-encoded movie seems to average 20-25GB. Let's call it 25GB. By my calculations, that means I need something like 2200 TB to hold the entire Netflix library in HD form. That's like $200k worth of drives, and shrinking fast... and that's for one copy of every film in Netflix. I don't think the idea of putting one such server in every city, or even every few city blocks, is particularly radical at this point, and it will seem even less radical in six years when the cost is down to $13k (with, one hopes, concurrent shrinkage in energy usage and support costs). We'd have done this already if it weren't for the licensing issues. The BitTorrent hobbyists have been pretty darned successful already, considering that using BitTorrent to swap commercial movies is not only kind of complicated (relative to, say, TiVO) but also illegal.